SOCIETY | ANTHROPOLOGY | IDENTITY

Lessons of mistaken identities

(and why language doesn’t matter as much as we are made to believe)

My mother and her mother — in a typical post WWI photographer studio setting (from my personal collection)

This is going to be a short piece. At the occasion of International Mother Language Day declared by UNESCO, I was prompted by my friend Professor Ritika Mahajan (MNIT, Jaipur) to write in, or something about, my Mother Language.

Love of language

Of course the idea of writing in or about languages less common than the big five (Mandarin, Spanish, English, Arabic, Hindi/Urdu) is appealing (source). After all, I started my career as a linguist and a philologist academic, and I am known by my friends to be a somewhat reluctant, though rather prolific writer. Everything about me says that I am forever a lover of language and languages.

From my European education, I am happy to have taken Latin in school — which means I am never in too much trouble in most of the regions of my native continent. Indeed, Latin is directly related to Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, Catalan, Romansh and other Romance languages, and indirectly to many more, including most of the languages of the Persian and Aryan (North Indian) families, from Farsi to Bangla and as far south as Sinhala. Interestingly, even the non-Latinate…